The Path

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You must first become me, on the 7th of June of 2008. A time when some doors have opened and a lot of doors have closed.
When hands wave from a distance, remains of charred skin and ashes of the dead that still channel light through the emptiness where their eyes were, when they had eyes...
Still sing through the emptiness where their mouths were, when they had mouths.
They are still present as ghosts and as ghosts they now retreat, into a realm of fog and things that are nothing other than things and fade into each other like clouds of colored gas.

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Place yourself then in San Francisco, in the Bay Area, in Daly City to be precise. Let your attention come to rest here, and look up at the ceiling that danced one time and may yet dance again.
Look out the window at a blue sky and a road that you remember as alien and now you know as well as the palm of your hand, or better.
Travel through the chaos of multiplicity that is the city, where signs tell you what you want and how you can get it and people call for help and nobody answers and people offer toys and everybody runs.
Drive through carefully before you are snared in its metallic tendrils, find your way through the vast road that empties into water and comes to rest on stone.

Keep on driving.
Don’t look back.

Come to a land of hills and hats, of tattoos and noisy trucks, of vibrant bass lines and older women in mini skirts.
Refill your tank here.
Let the teenager in the green shirt be helpful and friendly, even as he wonders at your strangeness and your purpose. Look out at the big man in the little red car and the tall white man that leads the older woman across the road.
Let the boy in a sleeveless T-shirt pass in his blue truck and let your heart be warmed by his gratefulness.
Here the city already encroaches but its steel buttocks haven’t yet come to full rest.

Continue driving and find your way to the flat land, where men in hats know what they are doing as they point in all directions, their eyes bulging with meaning, their trucks roaring with force.
Look out over the side and find Jesus eating a hamburger and a woman next to him repeating over and over: “He is Lord, yes indeed.”
See how Jesus offers his hamburger smiling, see how he asks for a ride. Wouldn’t it be nice to have Jesus along to help you and guide you and save you?
Just say no.
Let him ask for your attention like the latina girls in their tights shorts that want to wash your car. Continue south and don’t look back.

Arrive to where the men in hats have grown older, more brown and more scarred, where their wrinkles extend like long roots into the earth and make them move ever more slowly, pulling on their trucks the color of dust and leading them some days to the closed massage parlor and other days to the little cafeteria where a large indian woman smiles in welcome and other days to the fields where they must build their life all over again, one more time.
Here Jesus still waits, but he is also older, bloodied, tortured, hanging from tall crosses and nailed with solid bits of city steel. Here the old Mexican women still mourn for him.
Here they still tell their stories and here, in the darkness, they still chant the names of the older gods that came before him.

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Push on further and find yourself in the emptiness, where all has come to rest.
Beyond silence, there is the wheat and the endless valley, extending forever in all directions.
Here you will lose contact with the few that still hold onto you.
Here the hard songs will get sadder and the sad songs will get harder.
Here you must fold into yourself and wait for nothing, for nothing is all that is coming, nothing for ages, nothing like little kisses from a sad girl, nothing like sighs in the almost lost wind of the hot summer afternoon.
Nothing and more nothing.
Let it wash over you, let it drain all that remains of the something, of the man tied to a cross, of the older women, of the men in the hats, and of the cold steel of the city.

If you find your way through emptiness you will arrive at the mountains. They will greet you with a gentle cold wind and a promise of white and green, of sharp curved roads like the hips of a lustful woman, of tall trees like the thoughts that build upon the moments as they trail off into memory, of brown earth covered in moisture and color, real beyond the wheat, grateful beyond the boy, welcoming beyond the woman, generous beyond the man.
Continue gently. Don’t move too fast.
Here is a moment of clear liberation. Don’t be too anxious to find its end. It has none.
It begins here and it ends here. Don’t stop, but don’t look away.
It will only disappear before you know it.

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And then come the true mountains, the giants beyond imagination that reach into the sky and tell you what you truly are, if you can hear it.
But you can’t because your ears are too small and your head is too big.
They extend far beyond your sight so that you can only see them by painting them behind your eyelids and gasping at their size.
They offer no consolation.
They are truth cut from raw rock and molded by water. They look down upon you from their heights and paint you in white and gray and green and black. They offer no approach through the road or the tenderness of curved angles. They have no mercy.
Don’t look at them too long or your legs may become like ice and your eyes may become spider webs of white rock that splash eternally into cold running water.

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When you can look away, simply come to rest on the river.
The river alone knows you. It knows how you travel through the same spaces, the same eternal chambers, over and over, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, generation after generation.
In its intimate cold embrace, wash yourself of me and become you once again.
Let the cold water announce that the skin has fallen, and the ages have spoken, and what was once is now again, and what is now will be forever.
In its eternal change, let it show you the way to the eye at the heart of the mountain, the one that never changes.

Now, drenched in the cold of the truth and minimized to invisibility by the giants that surround you, finally come to rest by the side of a sandbar, where the trees form an open hand and the river forms a gentle pool.
Here, finally, your voyage comes to an end. Sit calmly.
Don’t let the memories disturb you. When they come, let them become sharp with meaning and fold over the heights by their own weight. Let them become complete and in their completeness disappear and transform into a bird that sings, a pine cone that calls to you and tells you that here is your work.
Here as much as there, there as much as here.
With them as much as with the others.
With the others as much as with them.

Find twelve cones.
Arrange them in a circle.
Find one more and place it in the center.
Walk away.

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Now you are ready.